Nickel based superalloys are widely used due to their excellent mechanical properties and corrosion resistance. Therefore they are especially of interest for high performance and demanding applications. Examples are here components used in industries such as space, aviation, energy generation or petro-chemistry.  

The processing of this material class is costly due to the involvement of expensive raw materials and typically a high “build to use” or “buy to fly” ratio is typically required. Traditional processing techniques are casting in combination with forging operations followed by milling processes. Depending on the complexity of the geometry of a component this is directly related to a high raw material consumption.

Within this study the goal is to reduce the raw material consumption by using the Plasma Metal Deposition (PMD®) in order to fabricate near net shape components which only require minor milling operations and thereby help to save raw materials. In this case powders are injected into a melt pool, which is created by a plasma arc process followed by a layer by layer growth of a 3D structure.

Especially of interest are the high temperature performance of Nickel based alloys such as INCONEL 718. Here the PMD process was used and materials have been tested at temperature of up to 1.000°C. In addition to that the commercial alloys fabricated from powder based feedstocks different modified alloys were investigated as well as a study of the introduction of ceramic reinforcements was assessed. It could be shown that the high temperature properties at 800°C and 1.000°C are linked to the raw materials used, the deposition parameters and the applied heat treatments. Improvements compared to commercial reference materials could be demonstrated.